The head of BFG Technologies, a well-known Nvidia-exclusive supplier of graphics cards, admitted in an interview that Intel Corp.’s highly anticipated code-named Larrabee graphics processing unit (GPU) would change the market of graphics processors, however, he still said that Nvidia would be able to remain on top.“Next year we’re going to see a completely different competitive landscape and it will change how people buy graphics cards,” said Scott Herkelman, the president of BFG Technologies, said in an interview with Hexus web-site.
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This is the area that AMD is now targeting, and going to use multi-GPU setups to take nVidia on in the high end (look for the 4870x2 etc)
One thing Intel can do with larrabee is bang in lots of them into one card. It all depends on how one larrabee GPU does, but if like with CPUs, I see intel pushing 1, 2 and even 4 GPU larrabee cards if needed.
Only time will tell though.
Intel entered the discrete graphics market in the mid-90's, only to pull out just 18 months later...Matrox was the undisputed 2D king, 3Dfx was inside almost every gaming box, and nVidia was a rising star. Too much competition, and Intel was always behind in both capabilities and performance. Getting out of discrete graphics and concentrating on integrated graphics was a smart move on Intel's part.
However, I always look at the claims of unseen products with a cautious eye. For example, at launch nVidia admitted that the TnT wouldn't have as much performance as originally anticipated, which was disappointing, but at least they were honest and forthcoming about it before we slapped down $400 for one. Long after launch, ATi finally admitted the Rage wasn't nearly as fast as advertised, and then blamed it on the fact that their cards shipped with Beta drivers...and that the final drivers would achieve the promised performance (as we all remember, they canceled development on the Rage series before creating final drivers in order to concentrate their developers on the upcoming Radeon). Matrox kept promising performance cards for gaming, even claiming six years ago they were targeting nVidia with Parhelia...which couldn't beat the older GeForce 3 series cards, much less tango with the GeForce 4 series.
So will Larrabee change the landscape? It's all speculation at this point. People can point at all the specifications and architecture they want to argue that it will be a monster, but it's a story I've heard numerous times in the past.
you mean by there definition mini x86 cores
so it will be more like Co-CPU with Graphic capabilities then like a GPU
you mean by there definition mini x86 cores
so it will be more like Co-CPU with Graphic capabilities then like a GPU
I don't think they're mini-x86 cores, I think they're just vertex units which can crunch floating point math like crazy. I might be missing a few things though, should be more to it.
But while they can do graphics I think the strong point is for flat out number crunching and not really pixel pushing on a screen. So that intel can fight the GPGPU attack nVidia is doing. The big goal is to use the new "3D" tech process that lets you stack one core on another, so then in the future Intel can have it's quad or 8 or w/e core x86 CPUs with a larrabee on top for apps that work better on that etc.
If systems start becoming more integrated by one supplier with drivers supplied by one company for chipset/graphics ect, then that can only mean less stability issues in the long run.
I don't expect any of that to change. Intel keeps saying how dedicated cards are going to die, but I think we're seeing dedicated cards becoming more and more important.
Rahul (spelling?) of Voodoo in a recent video for the Envy 133 said you'd see a merging of the CPU and GPU within a year (or by the end of the year, or something), which would be really nice for laptops, but I just don't see it happening -- at least not happening with them being very powerful.
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